With people lamenting a cheap appearance to some of the items, that makes it harder to believe they were given a completed boxed set in advance, to examine and approve before signing off on it.

With all the evidence I've seen, I do believe that to be the case as well. First of all, they weren't able to even show pictures of the CE or its contents for a long time. Also, there's this recent tweet.

I guess it all boils down to the same cause as the scant communication: backer rewards didn't receive the attention and love they'd have deserved. Mind you, personally I am happy with the box, but haven't yet looked at the contents. The novellas are a different issue, but I've already voiced my opinion on those. Perhaps there's at least the chance that we'll receive Colin's novella in print that way, but I am not counting on it.

All in all it's really a bit disappointing, if you see how other projects go about the physical goods:

As you know, this game has a lot of custom made physical feelies that are being produced alongside the game itself. [...] Coordinating production and quality control of these items is more challenging that you'd expect, so we started on some of these items sooner rather than later.

Sure, that's no guarantee that the end result will turn out any better than the TToN CE, but at least it shows that the physical rewards are properly prioritized.

So,
basically everyone that got is KS-CE is disappointed. Fargo stated that nobody at inXile has seen a CE yet.
What gives? Those who pledged a lot for the signed CE will have to wait longer (especially those outside the US), and will in the end get a disappointing CE. With all the love and trust you received in the many KS campaigns, it is hard not to feel cheated. It really looks like your backers are the last ones you care about. Last ones to get the goods, last ones to be informed, and we also get inferior CE despite having paid 5+ times as much as the consumer that got it on release from your publisher. Well, don't count on me in the future as high pledge backer, should have given the CE pledge I gave you for WL3 to OE/PoE2.

We can't really know if they were themselves shocked at it when the first ones arrived for them to really see how they turned out.
Hypothetically, if that were the case... What could they do at that point but ship them? (Say 'No' ?)

I find it dubious, and hard to believe that anyone in business would intentionally choose to have a fall-apart product with their name on it; especially given the Kickstarter/Fig business model.

That either shows just another incompetent move on InXile's part (no business I've ever known wouldn't inspect/ receive a prototype of a product they're going to send out) or they did know the poor quality and figured the savings outweighed the expected bad PR. It's a shame either way as both reasons show a poorly run company. This on top of their other bad moves and poor sales with this project doesn't bode well for their future. They have lost the trust of many of their most vocal supporters. The ones who do a lot of InXile's PR job for them because they believed Fargo's promises of an independent studio that only caters to it's core "old-school" audience.

They definitely should have seen what was getting sold before hand, and if they really did leave it up to a 3rd party without any oversight, that's inexcusable. Mindx2 got it right, the "old-school audience" were the ones who hyped the hell out of this game, if they think their marketing alone will pay for future games they're in for a big eye opener.

So the cloth map isn't actually cloth, either? Can't wait to see how my Bard's Tale and WL3 CE's turn out Hope they include a bottle of lube in both of those for the way they're screwing us.

The map is made out of duck cloth, which is a cloth similar to canvas.

Really? I feels like plastic!
I notice that AGAIN you don't actually address the other concerns.
What are you even doing here?
Your company spits on us. The disdain is sickening. When will someone actually make a statement about the shitty quality of the Oddity Box contents?
Or do you plan to just not say anything and hope we just go away?
Maybe it time we really started making noise?
Maybe then Brian will actually say something of substance and maybe even be honest.
You sold us out! You know it! If you actually felt the content was worthwhile you'd defend it.
So go on. Where do you actually stand?

Why is the travelers guide so small? I only ask because I saw advertising for the collectors edition and a 100 page travelers guide. Plus photos I saw of it which I'll paste below made it look much thicker. Did the Techland collectors edition get a bigger guide?

Hey guys, there has been some confusion about the Traveler's Guide/manual that we've been looking into.

When creating the manual, we agreed with Techland that there should be two versions, the full backer version and a shorter one. We provided separate text for both of them, with the Traveler's Guide being ~30 pages vs. the full manual's ~80 pages (before formatting).

inXile requested samples of the retail and backer boxes from Techland, however, as of now, none have been sent, so we've been unable to verify this. However, based on the comments and photos/videos we've seen online, it appears Techland instead took the full backer manual, formatted it to fit into 40 pages (though they didn't remove contents from what we can see), and then called it the Traveler's Guide. Rather than having two separate versions, they instead used the same one for all boxes, which was not what we agreed on.

We are assuming there was some kind of misunderstanding on Techland's end, but regardless, we are not happy to hear that the contents seem to have been changed without our input, and will be following up with Techland about this.

Appreciate the effort, thank you.
Clearly there has been some sort of problem between InXile and Techland, given that you guys never received sample copies of the goods they were shipping in your name.
I like to think that you would not have approved the distribution, had you seen them.
Looking forward to seeing what you can do to address the situation.

Anytime I've bought printed material in bulk, I was seeing the quality of it the first time when I opened the box. For something like a hard-bound book, I would bet they were shown a generic example of the kind of book they had chosen. With people lamenting a cheap appearance to some of the items, that makes it harder to believe they were given a completed boxed set in advance, to examine and approve before signing off on it.

Some of the items might have seemed okay, others might have been disappointing when delivered; or perhaps the deciding opinion was completely fine with it... None of us can know this unless we were there. But like I said, I can't imagine a company deliberately putting their label on an embarrassing product; and [assuming it was; as some backers believe] if they didn't believe that it was... how is that underhanded or slippery?

We specifically chose a higher quality, thicker box. The feel is more premium than what we've done before on Wasteland 2 (which we thought already turned out pretty good to begin with). We also spent quite a bit of time selecting materials and print quality for the map and art book. We haven't received the boxes yet so we can't speak to the final result, though we'll certainly have words if the contents were changed from our specifications.

It's always hard to satisfy each and every person's exact preferences (and we know our supporters have high standards), but from the comments and photos we've seen on social media and elsewhere, it definitely seems most backers are happy with the results.

Hey guys, there has been some confusion about the Traveler's Guide/manual that we've been looking into.

When creating the manual, we agreed with Techland that there should be two versions, the full backer version and a shorter one. We provided separate text for both of them, with the Traveler's Guide being ~30 pages vs. the full manual's ~80 pages (before formatting).

inXile requested samples of the retail and backer boxes from Techland, however, as of now, none have been sent, so we've been unable to verify this. However, based on the comments and photos/videos we've seen online, it appears Techland instead took the full backer manual, formatted it to fit into 40 pages (though they didn't remove contents from what we can see), and then called it the Traveler's Guide. Rather than having two separate versions, they instead used the same one for all boxes, which was not what we agreed on.

We are assuming there was some kind of misunderstanding on Techland's end, but regardless, we are not happy to hear that the contents seem to have been changed without our input, and will be following up with Techland about this.

Did you also agree to the tiny size of the Art book that renders is basically useless? I assume you also decided to include meshes as a large proportion of the content. This is NOT art! So it filled with garbage filler and is printed on a tiny worthless (albeit well made) book. Well done!

I sincerely hope that all the other issues is Techland cutting corners, but somehow I doubt it.

Oh my.. This is my first collector's edition, but I saw many. Box is fine but rest is a cheap crap. Artbook is small format, map is some plastic shit, cd covers are cheap. I also have a t-shirt. Design and quality is shit as well. I'm so disappointed. This is my last preorder ever.

So the cloth map isn't actually cloth, either? Can't wait to see how my Bard's Tale and WL3 CE's turn out Hope they include a bottle of lube in both of those for the way they're screwing us.

The map is made out of duck cloth, which is a cloth similar to canvas.

Really? I feels like plastic!
I notice that AGAIN you don't actually address the other concerns.
What are you even doing here?
Your company spits on us. The disdain is sickening. When will someone actually make a statement about the shitty quality of the Oddity Box contents?
Or do you plan to just not say anything and hope we just go away?
Maybe it time we really started making noise?
Maybe then Brian will actually say something of substance and maybe even be honest.
You sold us out! You know it! If you actually felt the content was worthwhile you'd defend it.
So go on. Where do you actually stand?

Stop using "Us", "we" etc, You do not represent all of US. You represent yourself.